Ken’s Gateway Scares – KTLA’s The Family Film Festival with Tom Hatten

From the years 1978 to 1992 here in Los Angeles, an actor named Tom Hatten was often my weekend friend.  On Sunday morning’s he would bring us Popeye cartoons and take “squiggle’s” that we sent into the show and turn them into simple (yet to a 7 year old amazing) drawings and in the afternoons he hosted The Family Film Festival.  I know this footnote of local television history is so largely responsible for instilling my love of classic movies, expanding my cultural awareness, especially my first exposure to Japanese Animation (beyond Speed Racer) in the form of Space Cruiser Yamato (or as it came to be known latter Star Blazers) and exposure to classics of children’s horror such as “Mad Monster Party” ( and yes it’s already on the list for it’s own gateway scare article) and Munster Go Home!  And all of this was long before cable was littered with channels that play classic movies all the time (and are largely ignored now).

It was like our good friend Tom, who seemed to know everything and everyone in Hollywood history, was opening a treasure chest and letting us sample some nugget of long forgotten cinema gold (sometimes twice a weekend).  I very fondly remember seeing Chuck Jones’ The Phantom Tollbooth and classic comedy/horror film like Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein for the very first time on the show.

Mostly because the show had access to a variety of programming (I’m sure whatever they could afford broadcast rights for) from all over the world, This was also where I got my first true exposure to some of the “harder” stories of Hans Christian Anderson including one that cemented my lifelong fear of living anywhere snow exists: The Little Match Girl.

How does this relate to horrorbuzz?  Well first of all the sequence was from a Japanese animated movie called Hansu Kurushitan Anderusan no sekai – which Hal Roach had dub’d and released as The World of Hans Cristian Anderson and for the most part the story has little to do with anything relating to the reality of Hans Christian Anderson’s youth or honestly reality in any way.  It was definitely a left turn from western storytelling with the exception of this one ending sequence and that should be horror justification enough .  But the story and the way it was told stuck with me as a ghost story and fed many nights of childhood insomnia with fears of being alone, being frozen to death, and is presented here in the context of one of the personal pieces of my horror Lego brick collection.   It also was one of the primary reasons I studied and wanted to be an animator.  It was a childhood realization that animation was one of the only ways we could visualize moments like the passage way between life and death.  I have managed to find the original for your viewing confusion (try to ignore the long setup to the story) and also a beautiful version that Disney did a few years ago.  So here is tribute to one of those  horrifying childhood realization moments that life can be cruel, in perhaps my favorite “ghost” story The Little Match Girl.

I don’t know if we can ever be totally certain how we become haunt and horror fans. I know I always liked monsters and fantasy and things that were a little off center when I was growing up, and I have decided to explore some of those things in a series of articles. If you have ideas of things that you think contributed to your early HorrorBuzz please feel free to write and we will try and write about them as well.